


Lantern in the Window

by Destina



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-22
Updated: 2006-10-22
Packaged: 2018-02-23 11:35:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2546081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destina/pseuds/Destina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean blows into town twice, maybe three times a year.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lantern in the Window

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LJ in 2006. Thanks to elynross for beta.

Dean blows into town twice, maybe three times a year, whenever the road takes him through southern Indiana, which isn't often. When you were both ten years younger, he and Sam spent a few weeks here with you and Mike, cleaning out anything supernatural a hundred miles in each direction. But Mike is dead now, has been for almost a year, and Dean still stops by anyway, out of friendship with you or respect for your dead husband, you're not sure which. 

You never tell him how glad you are, because you're sure you'd never see him again if you did. 

The doorbell rings at 3:00 a.m. on a September night, muffled by a thunderstorm passing through on the tail end of summer. In your flannel pajamas, bare feet freezing on the hardwood floor, you open the door and find him on the porch, backlit by far-away lightning, head down and collar up. He looks at you, lips quirked up in a smile. 

"Get in here," you say, and Dean Winchester does what you tell him to, because it doesn't cost him anything. 

"Kelly," he says, and graces you with a hug. Cold leather presses against you, its chill seeping into your sleep-warm body, until finally he lets you go. "Good to see you."

"Coffee?" you ask, though it's really not a question, and he follows you down the hall and into the kitchen, the warmest spot in the house. You flip on the light over the stove and make half a pot, since for you it's only tea that works in the wee hours. Once the kettle is on the stove and the coffee is percolating, you turn to him and take your first good look. 

It's always like this, the first few minutes: an inspection for new damage, checking to be sure he hasn't lost an eye, or a limb. He withstands your scrutiny better than he did all those years ago, when he frowned and told you to stop behaving like a mother hen. There's invisible damage, though, and it's piling up. In place of the wisecracks he used to dish out like candy, now there's weary silence. You don't like it, but there's nothing you can do about it. 

He accepts his coffee black, gives you a half-smile of thanks in return. "I can make some eggs and toast," you offer. "With strawberry jam."

"Homemade?" he asks, entirely too hopeful. 

"Not in this home." 

For a moment, he looks like he might refuse, but then you see his resistance waver, and you're surprised by how fast he gives in. "Yeah," he answers. "Yeah. That'd be nice." 

It's easy, doing by rote what you used to do for Mike every morning before he left for work. It hasn't been so long that those old habits have completely died. "What brings you by?" 

"Will-o-the-wisps on the Wabash," he answers, between sips of coffee. "No swamp gas, no nearby highways. Some reports of disappearances."

"Lost souls," you murmur, turning back to the pan. The eggs are simmering quietly in a pale yellow heap. 

"I could use some help with local research." 

"I can think of a few legends off the top of my head." There's an entire shelf on local folklore in the den - goblin lights feature prominently in most of those books. "I think I have what you'll need." 

"I was hoping you'd say that." He eyes the plate of eggs you set in front of him with a kind of forestalled hunger, and it makes your heart ache. Then he tucks in, toast in one hand and fork in the other, and you leave him to it while you comb the bookshelves for references. 

He comes to find you fifteen minutes later, catching you on the floor with books spread out around you and a pen in your hand, scribbling notes for him as fast as you can. His jacket is off, and some color is back in his face. "You don't waste any time, do you?" he asks, pushing a few books aside to settle next to you. 

"No time to waste," you say quietly, without looking up. He takes your meaning; it's not like you have to be subtle with Dean, who doesn't do subtle under any circumstances. You hand him two sheets of paper covered with local lore, the best information he's liable to find anywhere, and resist the urge to apologize for the chicken-scratch handwriting. He already knows. He's an expert in reading your scrawls. 

Once upon a time, Mike and Dean used to double-team you about it. 

He's reading over it now, a tiny frown creasing his forehead, and when he looks up, you say, "Consecrate the river upstream and when it flows down, the souls are released."

"That's too easy," he says, but he's looking at the patch of skin where the flannel gapes open at your throat. 

"Do you have to risk life and limb for it to be worth doing?" 

He doesn't answer, but that's because his lips are at the hollow of your throat, aimed there like he's finished sighting the target, and you tilt your head back, smiling. This is familiar. 

For all you know, he has a string of women across the Midwest, one in every tiny town, but you couldn't care less. He's not Mike, but he's kind, and he's got good hands. 

When he gets you upstairs, into the big mussed bed, he spends a long time touching you, and you return the favor; you wonder sometimes who else touches him, and how long he goes without it, and whether he ever craves it, the way you do. But then he slides into you, sweet and slow, and he kisses you just the same way, and you realize that's really what this is about, anyway. 

It's by touch you find the new scars across his shoulder, four of them, parallel: claw marks. When you press your fingers into them, he gasps against your skin, and you try not to think about how hard that pain makes him come. 

When you greet your students in the morning, see their bright eager faces, you wonder if Dean was ever so innocent. You're pretty sure he never passed an innocent day in his life, and the sadness stays with you all day. 

He's gone by the time you get back. He didn't invite you on the hunt, and it's just as well. 

 

**

In April he's waiting on the porch when you get home from work. He's asleep beneath the front window, hands behind his head, as if the slatted boards are the most comfortable bed ever devised by man. Early spring sunlight slants across his chest. You prod him with the toe of your shoe until he opens one eye, like a backwards wink. 

"Lost?" you ask.

He sits up, arms around his knees, a little slower than he would have a decade before, though he's in damn good shape for a man of forty. "Always," he says, flashing a grin. 

For two days he climbs around on your roof, hammering, making repairs, setting shingles in the places winter storms have revealed as weakness. You supply iced tea and conversation from the top of the ladder or the edge of the roof, picking leaves out of the rain gutters and watching them float down to earth. 

"It's a bitch," he says, when he talks about banishing banshees, and you laugh out loud, because you've never heard of banshees actually manifesting anywhere in the west, but if Dean says he's killed them, then he has. He shares all he's learned about it, and you take mental notes, because you never know when you might need them. 

In return, you tell a few tales of your own. "Right here," you explain, drawing a finger across the section of your eyebrow you accidentally singed off while burning bones. It's a tale involving the art of make-do, of butane and a blowtorch gone horribly wrong, and he turns a sweaty, dubious look on you. 

"That's a rookie mistake."

"Oh, I see. Like when you set your pants on fire in Terre Haute?" 

When he smiles that self-deprecating smile and runs a hand over his face, the years fall away, but only for a few moments. 

You don't ask him until late in the second day, when he's tired, nursing a beer; you bring in Chinese take-out and pass him the rice, and then you say: "Heard from Sam?"

"He's great," Dean says, and then he says nothing more. You know Sam is somewhere in California, but you have no idea what's become of him; you don't hear much about him from others like you and Dean, and so you think maybe he's off the hunt, living some kind of normal life, like he mentioned once. But Dean's face is closed so tightly that you don't dare ask, and so you pass the orange chicken and eat in silence. 

He falls asleep on your couch, and you cover him with a blanket; you have business to take care of, and it can't wait. 

When you drag in at 2:00 a.m., he bandages the gashes on your lower back, lips pressed into a thin line, and asks questions: where the hell were you, what the hell's a were-cow, why the hell didn't you ask him to come along. It's after the last question has left his lips, after he notices his hand is threaded into your hair, stroking gently, that he stops and understands what he's said. 

You understand, too, which is why you aren't offended when he pulls his hand away and stows the first-aid kit without really waiting for your answer. You know why he goes back to sleep on the couch, blanket pulled up to his ears. It's the same reason you cry quietly into the pillow for a while before you let the painkillers knock you out, and why you welcome dreamless, drugged sleep.

In the morning he's gone, and you aren't surprised by that, either. 

 

** 

In June, he calls from somewhere in Kentucky, and you listen carefully to what he needs, then hang up and spend four hours tracking down information on water witches. You research local legends in the Louisville area, and it requires a trip to the library, and then it takes you five tries over twenty minutes to reach him. He listens, thanks you, hangs up. 

A week later, he knocks on the door on a Saturday when your house is full of local friends there for dinner, and he won't come in, but his hands are full of wildflowers. He gives them to you with a smile, tells you that they're blooming now in the place where he killed the witch, and a grin spreads over your face. 

They last nearly a week before they start to wilt, and you resist the incredibly girly impulse to press and keep them. Faded and dried, they have no meaning. Dead is dead. 

 

**

September brings a visit from Mike's mother, collecting the last of his childhood things. She can barely look at you, and she tries to avoid the pictures on the walls, the constant reminders of her son's absence. You understand, and you try to be kind, but her pain seems much more present than your own, and those are wounds you can't sew. 

It's not until late the next day that it hits you, a curling, smothering wave of grief, and you go out looking for something to kill, but there isn't anything at all. It's as if the entire supernatural realm has decided to keep its distance, just for that night. 

You hold out for two days under the crushing weight of it, and then you pick up the phone and dial Dean's cell, first time since you've known him, thirteen years and you've never called. You're calm on the phone, but when you ask him to come, his voice changes, and he tells you it will only be a few hours, that he's on his way. 

By the time he arrives you've decided not to answer the door, but that doesn't work; he kicks it in. 

What you remember about it later is hazy. There was tequila and beer, and maybe you cried, but mostly you think he fucked you on the couch, harder than he would have otherwise because you were biting his skin, and he fucked the rage and the grief right out of you, simple exorcism. It's what he's good at. 

Eventually, when you fall into bed, you ask him things you wouldn't have asked him sober. Sometimes he answers. The things that stand out in your memory: 

_I used to look at the old man and think I was like him, and goddamn if I wasn't right._

_It's good that I never had kids; can you imagine me and kids?_ (He didn't like your answer.) 

_I just want Sam to be happy._

He never offers to fix the door. 

 

** 

Snow piles up thick in December, worst winter on record. Blizzards and sleet storms and black ice covering every surface of the road, and that's when Dean blows in with the storm, wearing a thin jacket as if the concept of a winter coat never occurred to him. 

He stays for almost a week, and you hunt together twice, in the crisp cold snow, every breath sharp like a knife when you're running, blood hot in your face and hands warm in soft gloves you made to help you hold weapons made of steel and iron. 

On Christmas Eve, he locks himself in the bathroom and makes a phone call. At least, that's what you suspect he's doing; it's either that or he's lost his mind, and is talking to himself in the mirror. 

When he comes down from the bedroom, he's got his bag, and he's not smiling, but he looks relaxed, peaceful. You hand him broken cookies for the road, zipped tight in a baggie, and he laughs. He kisses your closed eyes at the door and leaves you there, and you would give him his present for the road to California, but you didn't get him anything. 

 

**

 

In the middle of May, you realize you've started counting the months, and a strange dread settles in, bringing soft paranoia. You don't call, don't call, don't call, and then you do, but you get only a voice mail message, and he never calls back. 

When spring starts to tip over into summer, on your knees in the garden, you plant wildflowers all around the back steps, and then you stand looking at the freshly tilled dirt, willing them to grow. 

It's only a week later when you look up and notice the car in the street, and you open the front door. It's been a long time, but Sam looks the same, just as tall as you remember. There's a smile on his face for you when you meet him on the porch, but you know the look in his eyes because you've seen it in the mirror, a terrible dark sorrow that's waiting for him, trying to pull him under. 

When Sam stoops to give you a hug, you hope that maybe, just for a little while, Dean was happy.


End file.
